Canadian suburbs see influx of visible minorities

OTTAWA — Visible minorities continue to increase their clout in Canada, forming more than half the populations of several suburbs of major Canadian metropolitan regions.

This is among the findings of a new survey released Wednesday by Statistics Canada.

About 6.26 million Canadians identified themselves in this category, which includes people who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour, but does not include aboriginals.

The National Household Survey, a volunteer questionnaire that replaced the long-form census, reported that this total represented 19.1 per cent of the Canadian population, up from 16.2 per cent in 2006.

Statisticians caution that while the 2011 data may provide a broad scale picture of Canada, some of the numbers may not be reliable, because of its voluntary nature, which tends to cause gaps from some groups such as new immigrants and low-income families.

Only 4.7 per cent of Canadians identified themselves as visible minorities according to 1981 census data.

Patti Tamara Lenard, a social sciences professor studying immigration issues at the University of Ottawa, said she believes the growth is changing Canada’s cities for the better.

“Cities that have lots of migration are cosmopolitan, outward-looking cities full of culture and dynamism,” she said in an interview, prior to seeing the new data.

The vast majority of visible minorities live in Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec and Alberta, according to the new survey. B.C. had the highest proportion of its population in this category at 27.3 per cent, followed by Ontario at 25.9 per cent and Alberta at 18.4 per cent.

In Quebec, only 11 per cent of the population identified itself as visible minorities.

Most of Canada’s visible minorities live in its largest metropolitan regions, led by Toronto with 2.6 million visible minorities or 47 per cent of its population, followed by Vancouver with 1.03 million visible minorities or 45.2 per cent of its population and Montreal, with 762,325 visible minorities, making up 20.3 per cent of its population.

But in some cases, those regions had a larger proportion of visible minorities in the suburbs.

For example, more than 72 per cent of the population of Markham, Ont., and 70 per cent of the population of Richmond, B.C., was estimated to be made up of visible minorities.

Overall, the most common visible minorities in Canada, in descending order by population, were South Asians, Chinese, blacks, Filipinos, Latin Americans, Arabs, Southeast Asians, West Asians, Koreans and Japanese.

Mdesouza@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/mikedesouza

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